How many notes are there?

Of course the answer is infinite, because there will always be new ones as high or low as you want.

But really, humans can only hear frequencies of about 20-20,000 hz, which encompasses about 120 standard notes.

Except each octave, the notes just repeat, going A B C D E F G and back to A again, so there are really just 7 notes.

But then we need to include the flat and sharp versions of each note, listed as A Bb B C C# D Eb E F F# G G# and back to A, so there are really 12 notes.

But what is a note? It’s just a specific frequency that we associate with some letter or symbol, and there are infinitely many possible frequencies, even within an octave, so we’re back to our answer being infinite.

So why, for nearly all music we’ve ever heard, played, or written, do we use 12 notes?

The short answer is that it’s the standard. Since the early 1900s, 12 tone equal temperament, or 12-TET, has been in common use. As standards were being established for instruments, variation in tuning became less common, so to this day, there’s little reason to deviate.

The long answer encompasses thousands of years of tuning science and history, numerous systems that have since fallen by the wayside, and a wealth of alternative tuning systems that find use at smaller scales as an attempt at a “more perfect tuning”.

This site is an attempt at providing that answer, with a focus on my personal favorite of 31edo, and with the goal of providing tools and resources for anyone to understand the system, and even make it possible for people to compose their own music in this new harmonic landscape.

Keeping this site up takes money, and it would hurt my soul to fill it with ads, so if you like the content you see here or would like to support the goal of making 31edo more widely known, please consider donating to help me keep it going. Thank you, godspeed.

Ko-Fi